Ilze Wolff is an architect working in Cape Town. She co-directs Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, a practice that is concerned with developing an architecture of consequence. In 2007 she co-founded Open House Architecture, a research practice that documents the architecture of Southern Africa and in 2016 she co-founded pumflet: art, architecture and stuff, a publication and research platform concerned with the black social imagination. She is the author of Unstitching Rex Trueform: the story of an African factory, an interdisciplinary study of a modernist garment manufacturing factory in Salt River, Cape Town. Ilze’s main work as an architect is to reconstruct and seek out spatialities of collective freedom in conditions where it has been historically erased, violated and oppressed. Her belief in the ancient technology of storytelling finds its way in various forms of expression: architectural design, creative non-fiction writing, mothering, loving, film, gardening, teaching and prophetic organizing.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Their work investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances. Their publication ‘And Yet My Mask Is Powerful’ is published by Printed Matter. They are recipients of the Open Society Foundation fellowship for 2020- 21 and are artists in residence at Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva 2021. Their upcoming project ‘May Amnesia Never Kiss Us On the Mouth’ will be released with Dia Art Foundation as part of their Artist Web Projects with an upcoming exhibition at MoMA.

Omar Dewachi is Associate Professor of medical anthropology at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers in 2018, Dewachi taught social medicine and global health in Lebanon, where he co-founded the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut. Trained in clinical medicine, public health, and anthropology, Dewachi’s work examines the social, medical and environmental impacts of decades of war and violence in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, is the winner of the prestigious New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2019. The book documents the untold history of the rise and fall of Iraq’s healthcare under decades of US-led interventions. His forthcoming manuscript, When Wounds Travel, chronicles close to two decades of ethnographic research and public health practice on war and displacement across the East of the Mediterranean. More specifically, the work documents the widespread of conflict-related injuries, Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria, and the reconfigurations of healthcare and humanitarian geographies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon under decades of protracted conflicts.

Grada Kilomba is an interdisciplinary artist whose work draws on memory, trauma, gender and post-colonialism, interrogating concepts of knowledge, power and violence. “What stories are told? How are they told? And told by whom?” are constant questions in Kilomba’s body of work, to revise post-colonial narratives. Kilomba is best known for her unique practice of storytelling, in which she gives body, voice and form to her own texts, using performance, staged reading, video, photography, publications and installation. Her work has been presented in major international events such as: La Biennale de Lubumbashi VI; 10. Berlin Biennale; Documenta 14, Kassel; 32. Bienal de São Paulo.

Shimabuku finds an endless source for his work in language. He surveys his surroundings with a perspective which turns daily practices into strange moments of contemplation. He appropriates existing incongruity in our looking at things: for some, a stone might only be a mundane stone; for an octopus it might be a valuable belonging. Born in 1969 in Kobe, Japan, Shimabuku is an artist who collects unusual encounters. Each of his works (including videos, sculptural installations, performance documentations, and photography) tells the story of these improbable situations across borders, species, and states of being. He experiments with all kinds of interactions, pushing back the limits of physics and the imaginary. For his talk he will reflect on his history and present concerns as an artist.

Natalia Brizuela writes and teaches about visual culture, art, film, media, literature and critical theory from Latin America, with a particular focus on experimental practices that bridge aesthetics and politics. She is the author, among others, of Fotografia e Imperio (2012), Depois da fotografia (2014), The Matter of Photography in the Americas (2018) and La cámara como método (2021), and has curated numerous exhibitions and film programs. She is currently preparing the exhibition How to Change Everything (La Mama, 2022) and finishing a book on the refusal of Time. She is Class of 1930 Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, and a Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa was born in Guatemala in 1978. He currently lives and works in Guatemala City. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a research fellow at Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2013. Using performance, sound, drawing, and sculpture, Ramírez-Figueroa’s work conjures live and sculptural representations that explore themes of loss, displacement, and cultural resistance.

Gloria Elizabeth Chacón is associate professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures (2018) and coeditor of Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America (2019). She also co-edited a special issue on Indigenous Literatures for Diálogo, DePaul University (2016). Her scholarly articles have been published in Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Germany, and Spain. She is currently working on a coedited anthology, tentatively titled “Tearing Down Disciplinary Barriers: Dialogues between Hispanic and Indigenous Studies,” and her second book, preliminarily titled “Metamestizaje, Indigeneity and Diasporas in the South-South.”

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an artist, writer, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. Her work is concentrated in media studies, visual culture, and West Asian diasporas. In 2021, she will serve as Mellon Professor in the Practice at Occidental College, where she is co-curating the exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” at Oxy Arts. She is an Associate Director of Research at the Berggruen Institute, and an Associate Editor for Noema Magazine. Her book, Algorithmic Bias Training, or, Lectures for Intelligent Machines, is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books.

Mezna Qato is Margaret Anstee Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is a historian of Palestine and Palestinians, and is writing a book on the pedagogical worlds of Palestinians after the Nakba. She co-leads the Archives of the Disappeared Research Programme at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge, and is a Trustee of the Qattan Foundation. Her collaborative work with ‘A Future Collective’ was in the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial’s Bahrain Pavilion (2018) and Performance Space in New York (2018).

Mohammad Al Attar is a Syrian playwright and Dramaturge. He is considered an important chronicler of war-torn Syria. He studied English Literature at Damascus University and Theatrical Studies at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus. He also has a Masters in Applied Drama from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently a fellow at the 'Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin' (the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin). His plays have been staged at various international theaters and venues around the world. They include Withdrawal (2007), Samah (2008), Online (2011), Could You Please Look into the Camera? (2011), A Chance Encounter (2012), Antigone of Shatila (2014), While I Was Waiting (2016), Iphigenia (2017), The Factory (2018), and Damascus 2045 (2021).

Forest Young is a global design leader, educator and speaker. Today, he leads brand design at Rivian. He was the first Chief Creative Officer at Wolff Olins — which was recently named Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company for Design. He is a founding advisor for MillerKnoll's Diversity in Design collaborative, and recently served on the National Board of Directors for the AIGA. Forest was invited to join Fast Company's inaugural Impact Council and his work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Royal College of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and at international biennials.He has received the industry's highest design accolades including the Gold Design Lion at Cannes and the Art Directors Club Black Cube. His passion lies at the intersection of storytelling, universal design and futurism. He was invited by the California College of the Arts to envision and teach the inaugural MFA course in Future Design. Forest holds a BS in Human Development from Cornell University and MFA in Graphic Design from the Yale School of Art.